My first cursory look at Mighty No. 9 didn’t exactly inspire confidence. The painfully generic Saturday-morning cartoon art direction didn’t quite jive with me from the early stages in the games development, but seeing it in action with the flattest lighting and sickly color palette was just an incredibly unpleasant experience.
The game just looks bad, not only in art direction but in visual fidelity as well. In no way does this look like a modern console game, and the underwhelming visuals and design make it even more confusing, because the performance just isn’t up to snuff either, as the framerate would regularly dip considerably on a modern gaming PC. It wasn’t enough to impede my progress through the game, but it definitely made it a more unpleasant visual experience.
Despite the game looking like a hot mess, I really wanted to give it a fair shake and see if the gameplay ideas ended up working out for the better, and in the early part of the game’s three to five-hour campaign, I was hopeful.
While the core concept of taking out a boss and assuming their powers isn’t as ground-breaking or interesting now as it was back in Mega Man’s hay day, it’s still a fun and novel concept, so long as the powers gained are fun to use. That’s where Mighty No. 9 falters. Taking out an enemy and absorbing his abilities should feel cool and empowering, but instead most of them end up being almost entirely useless in combat, and the level design never really requires you to use anything outside of the standard skill set.
The uninspiring design applied to levels also held true for boss battles, and might be Mighty No. 9’s most egregious crime. Mega Man’s boss battles were the centerpiece of the experience. Sure, you can take them on in any order you want with your standard mega buster and maybe win, but there was a level of strategy of finding out which powers worked well on who and tackling them accordingly.
Here, I never had any issue taking on a boss and demolishing them with only the standard blaster you have from the get-go, and that sucks. It flies right in the face of the very formula that Mighty No. 9 is trying to ape, turning the game into a hollow copy instead of a worthy successor.
At the end of the day, I’m not even angry about Mighty No. 9. Instead, I’m just profoundly disappointed.
For what was supposed to be a spiritual successor to one of the greatest retro platforming series of all time, complete with developers of a great pedigree, the game somehow manages to miss a sense of what was even fun about Mega Man in the first place. Granted, now and again you’ll see some aspects of it shine through, but even those minutes are short lived and lackluster.
Ultimately, Mighty No. 9 feels more like a quickly assembled, mid-cycle, download-only Xbox Live arcade game that you would see circa 2008, not a game that was hotly anticipated and crowdfunded almost a decade later. They can call it a spiritual successor all they want, but it lacks any of the soul of what came before it, and that’s a crying shame.
This review is based on a copy of the game for Steam sent to SideQuesting by the publisher.
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